A must read for everyone in the information technology field. It
explores the difficulty of bringing new and innovative technologies into
the market, particularly at large organizations where existing reward
systems serve almost as a corporate immune system against innovation.

Norman takes us on a tour of the things we run into everyday and how
much their design can frustrate us to the point where we feel stupid and
inept at using these things. Norman frees us from that thinking. One of
my favorite examples from the book is where Norman asks the reader
whether they've ever had the experience of pushing on a door only to
have it not move and then see the big PULL sign. We all feel stupid when
this happens and hope no one saw us. Norman says from now on we are
free to say "stupid design!" A door by its very design should
communicate whether it should be pushed or pulled. A door shouldn't need
a user manual! This thinking should also be applied to software and is
the essence of the goal of our High-Tech Anthropology® design team when
designing user interfaces. This book along with Cooper's, mentioned
next, forms the foundation of our design thinking.

This is a 300 page book where Alan Cooper, the founder of Cooper Design
and father of Visual Basic describes why engineers commonly do not
possess the talents required for user interface design predominantly
because they know too much -- they understand how the computer works and
users typically don't care how the computer works, they just want to do
their job. It introduces the age-old concept of the "persona" as a
decision-making tool for software requirements gathering and user
interface design. The persona is an essential tool of Menlo's
requirements gathering and design practice.

DeGraff and Lawrence from the U-M Ross School of Business apply their
"Creativity Map" to organizations and the individuals within them (along
with an accompanying paper tool so that we can see where each of us
fall within the map). Often we are trapped into thinking that creativity
and creative people can only be found in certain types of corporations
or certain departments, or they are only the artistic right-brained
people. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, if we are
going to be truly creative we need to recognize that creativity,
innovation and brainstorming must be applied in all types of
organizations, departments and by all types of individuals. The book
helps us see how vastly different organizational styles from very
successful corporations can all still exhibit a great amount of
creativity. You'll recognize the name of a certain VP of Development at a
company called Interface Systems in a story detailed between pages
115-121. Jeff DeGraff also leads a twice-a-year three-day seminar for
U-M's Executive MBA program called "Leading Innovation". He spends the
first half of the second day here at Menlo Innovations where James and I
lead their students through Menlo's unique brand of brainstorming.

I read this about 15 years ago and its message haunted me. I wanted to
build a learning organization! Senge described them but didn't provide a
roadmap to make one. This began my search that ultimately led to
creating the Java Factory at Interface Systems and then the Menlo
Software Factory. Pairing in an open and collaborative environment, a la
Edison's Invention Factory in Menlo Park New Jersey, where a key tenet
is to "make mistakes faster", built on the trust as described by
Lencioni in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team combine to foster the
elusive but powerful learning organization. I've seen it work for 8
years now and I'm fascinated by it everyday. I liken it to watching a
747 land. I know all the principles that cause the 747 to fly, but I'm
still as fascinated as a child when I watch it at the airport.

A great tour of the forces at work in today's global economy. For better
or worse, this is the world in which we live. Let's not only understand
it, but make it work to our advantage. After all, we created the
world's flattening technologies, let's not be flattened by them! I've
turned talking about this book into a small "cottage industry" here in
Southeast Michigan.

We're probably all familiar with Geoffrey Moore's "Crossing the Chasm"
which describes the adoption curve of personalities for new technologies
as "Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and
Laggards". This is the book that defined the "science" behind that curve
and named the personalities. The book includes great stories and
frightening ones if you hope it's going to be easy to introduce a new
innovation. It took the British Navy 300 years to formally adopt citrus
to combat scurvy even though there was overwhelming evidence to its
great effect.

Edison's team was in many ways the original "Extreme Programming" team! A
minor invention every two weeks and a major one every six months was
the motto of his Menlo Park, New Jersey "Invention Factory" where he
thrived on experiments and making mistakes faster in an open and
collaborative work environment. My childhood visits to the re-creation
of Edison's lab in Dearborn's Greenfield Village continue to inspire me
to this day and ultimately led to the naming of our company. I often
tell people that if we truly want to know how to build software in the
21st century, we have to look back 130 years. Menlo Innovations has
attracted the attention of the world's foremost experts on Edison
including Paul Israel, John Bowditch, William Pretzer and Sarah Miller
Caldicott (Edison's great grand niece). This is a very inspirational
book! I was recently honored as the keynote speaker at the "Innovation
Michigan" summit held at Greenfield Village. As I spoke about the impact
of Edison's thinking on my own, I could look out and see the re-created
Edison Invention Factory. Quite a magical moment for me.

Chris explains in very approachable detail the interesting world we've
created with bits vs. atoms. In particular, it shows why eBay, Amazon,
Netflix, Google Adwords, iTunes and other on-line retailers have the
power to move away from mass marketing into the far bigger market of
niche marketing where niches can cater to a near-infinite number of
incredibly small communities, something the "atoms peddlers" cannot do.
These lessons have profound implications for all technology and
marketing strategies.

Extreme Programming Explained (first edition)

By Kent Beck

The book that started it all: Story cards, estimating and planning,
small iterations, open and collaborative workspaces, automated unit
testing, continuous integration, pair programming, sustainable work
pace, code stewardship instead of code ownership, test-first design,
coding standard, refactoring, and simple design. We continue to apply
all but one of the principles of this book. The one we have substituted
out in favor of our High-Tech Anthropology® practice is "Customer Always
Present". We like to say "Voice of the Customer Always Present". We
believe the best thing we can do is to leave the customer/user right
where they are and go study them (like anthropologists do) in their
native environment then bring that information back to the technical
team followed then by testing the evolving designs as supported by the
practice of iterative and incremental development.

Chapter 4 introduces what I like to call the most revolutionary practice
in software development to occur during my career: Junit - the
automated unit testing framework for Java. This simple concept is the
equivalent of the discovery of Bernouilli's principle as applied to
airplane wing design. It makes everything else possible. It astounds me
how few software teams actually apply this simple principle to their
efforts even though Fowler and Beck introduced this concept in 1999. Ah,
there's that "Diffusion of Innovations" problem!

Starts the discussion of how exactly to we plan an agile, iterative and
incremental software development practice. It enables us to put the
business in control of software projects rather than the technical team.
Probably worth noting that Menlo's "Project Planning Origami™" is first
officially described on page 81 of this book as James Goebel describes
our planning game tools as first used in the Java Factory at Interface
Systems.

We tend to put less faith in reusable code (as that mission often
interferes with accomplishing real business goals) and far more faith in
reusable ideas. This book details many reusable ideas that once
mastered by a team of developers can often speed up the conversation of
software structural engineering and ultimately greatly speed up the
actual development.

This book describes the approach to innovation taken by IDEO, arguably
the world's leading industrial design firm. IDEO's approach to design,
innovation, workspace, and teamwork have had a great influence on our
thinking here. When team members from Google came to visit Menlo
Innovations a few weeks ago, I had a "proud moment" when, after having
seen our operation, asked me if I had ever heard of a Palo Alto firm
called IDEO as our operation reminded them greatly of what they had seen
there.

A set of 51 cards with 51 different "methods" for requirements gathering
and design, one per card. We've found this toolkit to be quite helpful
when creating storycards for our design teams. The cards often remind us
of the different approaches we can take when doing needs assessment,
requirements gathering and early design.

I particularly enjoyed the opening line of the book that reads "Not
finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork alone that is the
ultimate competitive advantage both because it is so powerful and so
rare." The pyramid he describes of trust, conflict, commitment,
accountability and results is essential to understand by anyone trying
to build a great team.

The main theme that resonated with us from this book is to hire for
talents rather than skills. Our industry is plagued by the desire to
hire for skills which, as we discussed, often traps people for their
entire careers in their "prison of knowledge". The saddest aspect of
this imprisonment is that we destroy their desire to contribute after a
time and then we wonder what happened to their enthusiasm for the job
and the mission.

We have more copies of this out-of-print book on our shelves than any
other. This book deals with the very real and very difficult challenge
of organization change. The theme that most resonated with us from this
book is that no matter the current situation everyone associates some
aspect of their current situation with personal rewards. For example, "I
like my office because the window looks out onto a small pond that the
sun reflects off of every morning. That makes me feel good about coming
to work. It makes me feel important to have such a nice office." If we
then suggest we are going to move you to an open and collaborative
environment and take you out of your office, we better replace that
reward with something else (and quickly) or risk silent or open
rebellion against the change.

A compendium of essays on managing the human resources of an IT team. In
particular, pay attention to a late chapter authored by Menlo
Innovations founders James Goebel, Richard Sheridan and Thomas Meloche
called "Extreme Interviewing to Find Team Oriented Programmers". This
describes the interview process I first used in 2000 to build the Java
Factory team at Interface Systems from a team of 14 to 34 within 4
months. We continue to use an updated version of this practice at Menlo
to grow our team. As you'll see it encompasses many of the lessons
learned form the above books and many others. One of our most memorable
"feedback items" from the experience was when one interviewee wrote to
say that "she didn't care whether she got hired or not, the interview
experience alone had changed her life!" (We did hire her and eight years
later she still works for us!)

Do people value an experience? So much so that they are willing to pay
for it? Should companies be thinking about the experience they are
providing to their customers? The answer to all of these is
overwhelmingly YES! At Menlo we apply the idea of "experience" in two
areas: the "experience" provided to our clients who engage us at the
Menlo Software Factory™ either for projects or training, and then the
experience we are creating for the users of the software we build.
Pine and Gilmore do an excellent job of walking us through the value
equation of many business models that move from commodities to products,
products to services, and from services to experiences. We pay pennies
per cup when we buy coffee in bulk and grind it ourselves, nickels when
Maxwell House does it for us, dimes when the waitress at The Broken Egg
endlessly fills our cup for us, and dollars per cup when Starbucks
delivers their great "barrista experience". The commodity is still at
the heart of all of these price points. The difference is the
experience.
This becomes truly powerful when you consider the implications of
delivering an experience that can create an authentic transformation.
This is what we are trying to achieve for our clients at Menlo and this
book has put words to many of the concepts we have bee pursuing for
years. This is a must-read for those seeking to dominate their market.

This book is an excellent treatise on the concept of the network effect
that Robert Metcalfe has stated in Metcalfe's Law: The value of the
network increases exponentially as the network grows.
Think of the things that you own or use today that you'd feel downright
stupid if you didn't: Google, cell phones, e-mail, computers, on-line
travel booking services. Consider your kids and their "relationships"
with Skype, Facebook, Myspace, texting, IMing, cell phones.
Are you seeing the power here and its implications for software design?
If we can build a piece of software that is widely adopted, then people
will start to feel downright silly for NOT using it and so they'll buy
it and start using it. One of the key goals of the Menlo Software
Factory™ is to design and build software that enjoys "widespread
adoption" by the target end user audience for whom it was designed. If
we do this, we can hit the "tipping point" of adoption and then it's off
to the races. If we don't then we are at best a footnote (think Apple
Newton vs. iPhone) in the history of our industry. It's that important.

Crowds of people are smarter as a whole than the smartest individual in
that crowd? This is counter-intuitive, as we've all seen the effects of
"group-think" and the fact the large groups usually far under perform
when compared to more focused and more deeply experienced small teams or
individual experts. However, when properly approached, the right
environment gets far better results from groups than from individual
stars and heroes.
We see this effect everyday in the Menlo Software Factory™. We get
better estimates from the team when they estimate in groups and when we
get multiple estimates for every story card. Switching the pairs every
week gets fresh eyes on old problems and suddenly the unsolvable is
solved. Moving people between projects multiplies this productivity.
Having everyone within earshot and eyeshot of one another in a big open
and collaborative work environment keeps this "wisdom of crowds" effect
humming along everyday. Edison created this effect in a similar way in
his Menlo Park New Jersey "Invention Factory".
Read this book and have some of your most basic assumptions about human
performance challenged.

This is a must-read business book. Whether it's the discussion of
Level-5 leadership, the hedgehog concept, or the flywheel effect, it is
imperative to understand how to take a company from just being good to
being truly great. He examines public companies as they have more
readily accessible objective performance data, but we see nothing that
limits these concepts to large public corporations. Much of the teaching
can be applied at the individual level.
Collins also outlines important concepts around building the "team".
This is where he describes "getting the right people on the bus, the
wrong people off the bus and then getting the right people in the right
seats." I would add that we should then focus on keeping the right
people on the bus after we get them there!
The issue of business focus is treated quite well here. Knowing what we
can be the best in the world at, what we are insanely passionate about
and what drives our economic engine can produce an unstoppable
"flywheel" that ultimately promotes us to "great" in the business world.

This powerful, counter-culture concept is a wonderful extension to Jim
Collin's thinking in Good to Great. Too often, companies believe growth
is the only path to success and reward, yet we are reminded everyday of
large companies who have lost their focus, lost their will and lost
their "mojo" as Burlingham refers to it.
This book is incredibly reassuring to those of us at Menlo Innovations
who are focused on building a great software design and development team
of about 100 people and that's it. We believe we can slay the world
with a team of that size. Bigger than that, and we begin to lose our
"mojo". We will use this team to supercharge the business of our clients
and in many cases we will take a leveraged stake in the business of our
clients to achieve what I think is business nirvana: "revenue growth
without expense growth". No offshore, no remote offices, no franchises,
no sprawling campus ... just a tightly focused team, a great culture, a
well understood process and wonderful relationships with our clients and
a team who one day I hope we can make financially independent and still
want to come to work the next day!

Getting extraordinary results from ordinary people. We've all heard this
line, but we seldom believe its possible. In this book, follow the tale
of the USS Benfold, the WORST performing ship in the US Navy when
Captain Abrashof arrived. Watch him apply powerful techniques (unheard
of -- almost forbidden in some cases) to transform it to the best damn
ship in the Navy in under two years. When you realize he's doing this
with 18-20 year olds who chose the Navy over college in most cases
because their high school performance took college out of the equation
you begin to understand the wasted potential that exists in most teams.
Wasted because management refuses to engage it.
This book is an inspiration to anyone trying to build a high-performing
team. It was recommended to me by someone who took one of our classes
and thought that Menlo Innovations reminded him of many of the stories
in that book. I couldn't have been prouder!